I’m pretty firmly closety about most of my viewpoints on genetic ethics, because it saves me all kinds of heated arguments with people who are wildly passionate about the topic, but significantly stupider than I am, but it’s time to open that door a wee crack, methinks.

The Observer has reported that British scientists have succeeded in bringing dead stem cells back to life, appropriate for development into stem cell therapies.

Scientists working at a British laboratory have achieved one of the most controversial breakthroughs ever made in the field of stem cell science by taking cells from dead embryos and turning them into living tissue.

The technique could soon be used to create treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the researchers say. The breakthrough has been hailed by many scientists and ethical experts because it could circumvent opposition to stem cell experiments.

‘This should get round opposition to stem cell science because live embryos will no longer need to be used in all experiments,’ said Professor Miodrag Stojkovic, the researcher who carried out the experiments at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University last year…

Scientifically, this is a huge step. Ethically it looks like one, but it may actually be nothing more than playing the shell game with life and death.

My biggest problem with all therapies that use human tissue is that the profit motive in the States, among many other markets, provides positive incentive for what you might call “tissue development” (pregnancy/embroyo culture) as well as “donation,” (abortion/diversion of cultures) not to mention obfuscation on the part of agencies accepting such donations.

What the hell am I talking about?

As long as there’s a market for stem cells, there’s a potential profit motive for abortion or fertilizing eggs and then preventing them from growing into babies, simple as that. In some countries the sale of tissue or rebate of medical services to the individual might be an option. In some countries the doctor might just say “we’ll take it away” and turn it right over to a capitalist corporation in return for money, product, or services including lobbying.

We have seen this with the market in cadaver tissue; we’re all a little more skeptical and nervous about signing that “organ donation” card, rightly or wrongly. Nobody wants to be reincarnated as Paris Hilton’s new ass in twenty years.

As long as the tissue is worth something on the open market, medical decisions will be coloured by this, either on the part of the individual patient or on the part of the organizations providing services either to the patient or the doctor. And I just don’t think this is morally justifiable.

This, however, I can almost get behind. There’s no profit motive set against any kind of life in this situation.

Or is there?

The availability of dead cells, of course, depends upon the production of living embroyos just the same as the availability of live ones does. Now if using dead cells is legal and live ones illegal, the cash incentive effect comes to bear on the maintenance of those embroyos’ health; inversely.

I acknowledge that using the cells of a dead embroyo is a vast ethical improvement over using the cells of a live one, but now that it may be economically feasable to culture and then allow to die a large number of embroyos, is the potential for harm not that much greater, because it is going to become that much more widespread, with an apparent ethical Get Out of Jail Free card?

‘In theory if an embryo is obtained ethically and a stem cell can be derived after that embryo has died naturally, then that will remove all ethical objections as there is no destruction of a living organism,’ said Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a Catholic campaign group. ‘We do not have objections to the use of donated tissue and organs in other areas of medicine…’

George Daley, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said the paper’s approach raised scientific concerns. ‘If there was something wrong with the embryo that made it arrest, isn’t there something wrong with these cells? We don’t know.’

However, Stojkovic‘s work was given strong backing by Donald Landry, at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who called the work an important addition to the field. ‘Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead, then the issue of personhood is resolved,’ Landry said.

‘This then reduces the ethics of human embryonic stem cell generation to the ethics of, say, organ donation. So now you’re really saying, “Can we take live cells from dead embryos the way we take live organs from dead patients?“‘

I just don’t think the people getting paid for the organ transplants should be connected with the people running the hospice; is that too much to ask?